Rochester DSM OneLap

Last summer Andre at Pina Motorsports introduced his chromoly rear upper control arms for the 1G AWD and VR-4 platforms.  They feature fully tig welded ends, heim joints, and a grease able ball joint end.   The fine members of  GalantVR4.org took up a collection and purchased a set for the RochesterDSM One Lap team.

Installing them is simple.  Just unbolt the ball joint and give the give the spindle where the joint passes through a couple of good whacks with a hammer to pop them out.  Then just unbolt the adjusters and the olds ones are out.  I made sure to measure the old arms before I took them out of the car so I when I installed the new ones I would at least be in the ballpark with my alignment.

Here you can see the Curtis modified control arms these new ones will be replacing.  These were “boxed in” for strength and they took everything we could throw at them last year.  If the chromoly arms were not donated we would have used these again for sure.

Here is one the new PinaMotorSports fully TIG welded chromoly control arms ready to bolt in.

Here they are installed.

Tuners Nation was kind enough to donate a set of there 1G AWD/VR-4 rear sub-frame and mustache brace bushing sets. Today I got to work installing them.

Here is how I did it.

1. remove the parking brake cables
2. remove the rear calipers and hang them on the rear springs.
3. unbolt the lower shock bolts and separate.
4. remove the rear section of the exhaust
5. disconnect the drive shaft from the diff.
6. put a jack under the diff and remove the 6 bolts holding the rear sub-frame/mustache brace and lower everything out of the car.

The One Lap car is in pretty good shape and seeing how I’ve had all the rear suspension out of the car just a year ago when I built it, everything came apart easily. I think I rolled the rear suspension in about an hour.

Looking at the entire rear suspension out of the car it becomes quite clear how important the front two sub-frame bushings are to the geometry of everything that attaches to it.  Take note of how the diff bolts to the sub-frame where the upper and lower control arms tie in.  That makes the mustache braces job even more important.  Not only does it have to keep the pinion angle in control under hard launches its also the rear two attachment points for the whole rear suspension.  Inspecting the stock 200k+ mile bushings shows that they’ve lived a hard life.  The sub-frame bushings were coming apart and the mustache brace bushings weren’t that far behind.  Replacing them with hard urethane will hold everything in place under hard cornering and let the suspension do its job.

To get the bushings out I first drilled around the center pins and then I used a sawz-all to finish cutting them out.

From there is was old school, get dirty, and burn the snot out of everything. I set the pins outside on a cinder block and set them on fire. Then I flipped the whole suspension with the diff pointing down so I can get at the sub-frame bushings. These have a two-piece inner sleeve that has to come out. Once again I set them on fire, waited, and then knocked them out with a hammer. There was still a bunch of rubber left in the sub-frame so I set that on fire too. Once the rubber gets hot and gooey most of it can be scraped out.

To get both the pins and the bushing cavities clean up I used a wire wheel in a hand drill. I greased up the bushings and pins and used a clamp to push them in.

Taking a cue from Curtis I spent some time bracing the mustache brace by fitting and welding some angle iron onto it. This will help keep the diff where it belongs under hard launches. I got as far as rolling the suspension back under the car before I called it quits for the day.

Last year we only had a handful of failed actions that kept us out of the rear view mirrors of the front runners.  Breaking down on the side of the road with the Ingalls rear control arms was a large one.   Through the community support of GalantVR4.org, we had a set of stock ones delivered us a day later, keeping us in the race, and allowing us to finish.

While we had a stable car, we lost the alignment and the ability to turn the car, putting at a disadvantage for the rest of the trip.

While the fan fair may have died down in the rest of the planet, the community on Galant VR4.org isn’t done supporting this race team.  Through a fund raising effort of private donations from the Galant VR4 community and the work of Andre over at Pina Motorsports, the One Lap VR4 will be sporting the toughest looking control arms that ever adorned the four door monster.

We received the control arms last week and hope to have them in place before the October trip to Watkins Glen with the Finger Lakes PCA.

It is still a little overwhelming to have this level of support coming from the community, but having the right piece on the car will mean a lot to make the trip more survivable in 2010.

While tuning the car last year, we noted that we only had a set of stock cam gears to work with.  While we knew that adding a set of cam gears was a low priority from a financial standpoint, we knew they would have helped us change the power band to something a little more effective for the track.

Through the generous donation of one of the members of the GalantVR4.org community, we now have a set of cam gears to go onto the car.  A very generous donation for us to put into the car for 2010.

For having a short list of items, it turned out to be a full day of work in the One Lap garage. I arrived early with the car, since Tim was coming in from out of town, and did some little items like mounting the new trailer spare, under the trailer.  Chris arrived nursing a hangover and Tim came in shortly after.  We had a list of items, including finishing up the nose work, adjusting the rear shocks, and painting the trim piece on the front, and wiring the rally lights.

I removed the gauge bezel for the last time and ran the wire for the AEM wideband o2 sensor, so we could log it with ECMlink. I also finally wired up the inverter in the trunk.  This will power our broadband router, as well as recharge laptops and whatever else we need.  It has enough power to run a small city or a nice drill if we need it, but we need to draw power in strides unless we start adding more batteries to the car.

Chris got to work on the front of the car, to finish up ducting into the intercooler.  Knowing that the air will take the path of least resistance, we want to make sure the only path for the air is through the intercooler and radiator.  Chris’s ducting came out perfect, although we had him cursing the removal process of that front bumper.

While the nose was off of the car, Tim moved in to get the black strip above the bumper painted to match the car.  There is a long history and tale behind the black trim piece, which can only be told in company of friends and lots of beer. 

We noticed that the car was running a little soft in the rear when we were at BeaveRun.  We actually didn’t notice it in the drivers seat, but it was more visible from the stands.  Tim pulled the Koni’s out of the car to stiffen them up.  To adjust the Koni’s you need to have them out of the car, fully compressed and rotate them to change the rebound rate.  After measuring the upper and lower movement tolerances, we stiffened them up from what would be considered 1/4 stiffness to 3/4 stiffness.  That should accommodate the extra weight of the Galant over Tim’s Eclipse.  We ran some rebound races, until we fine tuned them into the same rate on both sides.

The last touch on any car that resembles the original rally car is of course rally lights.  I had these lights from 199/1000 which I actually bought off of SCCA Rally driver Bruce Perry.  While the weren’t the round huge lights that the original car got outfitted with, they made a nice edition to the car and will probably help us if we need a little extra light.

A Friday drive in sunny 75 degree weather in a rally inspired 355hp One lap VR4 with working CRUISE CONTROL!

Yep, I fixed it and in the end is was simple. At the beginning I didn’t have power to the cruise and the horn didn’t work. A fuse fixed that. The next thing I did was to remove the clutch switch mod that was in the car. That didn’t fix it. Then I swapped the entire cruise control unit to one that I knew worked. That didn’t fix it. Then I swapped a good gauge cluster to be sure the speed sensor was working, and that didn’t fix it. Finally I started to pull out the clutch/brake switches one by one. Each one of them worked so that didn’t fix it. Next I check the switches in place with a continuity meter and the brake switch worked, the lower clutch switch worked but the upper clutch switch did not. I looked at it again and everything worked and I knew when the switch was out of the car it worked so I tried to adjust the switch closer to the pedal. nothing. A bit closer and still nothing. Finally I adjusted it to the point it was loading the clutch pedal and I said..hmmm that’s not right. I looked at the little rubber pad on the lever and it was there but when I got out my mini maglite and depressed the clutch with my hand I could see the pedal moving but the switch plunger was not. !

Stupid Mitsubishi uses a rubber pad where the pedals push the switches and those pads have a nipple on them that pulls through a hole in the pedal to secure it in place. Anybody guess what size that hole is? Yep, the same size as the switch plungers. The rubber piece had worn down enough to eject the nipple that held it in place so the plunger never closed with the clutch off. So the cruise thought I always had the clutch depressed. I taped a small piece of sheet aluminum to cover the hole and took it for a test drive.

That was it…and now I am happy.

Tim

PS. The injectors should be here Monday.

We rolled the car into Street Tuned Motorsports yesterday afternoon to put the car on their dyno and to enlist the aid of Emery in getting the car tuned with the ECMLink.  It was a bit of a learning curve for us all, getting to play with the new ECMLink version 3 software.

The car was on the DYNO for 4-5 hours, as Tim and Emery sat in the car and transformed the car from a pile of parts to a unified working machine.  While Tim learned the workings of ECMlink (which I am mildly jealous about), my job became sharing it with the world. We went live with the Ustream feed and were able to share the event with many of our supporters and followers out there.  I did record one video stream to Ustream but the laptop I was using was mildly slow, and soon the record uploads were not working.  I grabbed the video camera and recorded most of the runs from the day.

We still owe a huge thanks to STM for putting us on the dyno and providing us with the tuning time we desperately needed.

Its been a long day and I won’t have time to share all the details yet. I haven’t looked over the logs carefully enough but at the end of the day we are out of injectors. We were seeing 95 to 100 percent duty cycle and the link said we were at 52.9lbs/min flow so although we could turn the boost up for a quarter mile run it wouldn’t work for road racing.

We did a bunch of pulls at 22psi and then one at 24psi. The next pull we tried for 25psi but it hit 30psi instead. On that run Emery got off the gas at 6000rpms. That run made 372hp and was climbing fast. It was also without any knock.

We pulled the plug because the oil leak on the turbo drain line was getting worse and with the injectors running at there max and the turbo already at over 52lb/min there was no point. We also didn’t run the car past 7500rpms and in fact we did most of the tuning running up to only 5500rpms. The goal was to get it running right before we turned up the wick. That’s why there were a bunch of 300hp numbers coming out.

At the end of the day the car is running 25psi on pump and meth making 355hp on a Mustang dyno scaled for a 4000lb car. If the scaling was set to the cars real weight the numbers would have been higher but I am not a big fan of dyno numbers. I know two cars that came off that dyno that made at least 60hp less that run 11.9’s at 115mph. That puts us firmly in the 120’s where I wanted to be.

There are a few things that could wring out more power from the car. First is injectors. It will make power at 100% duty cycle but I think the torque curve showed the break down in the spray patten. 850cc or even 950cc would be better suited for the job. On a good note guess how much power it takes to max out 660’s? Over 400hp to the wheels so we are in a good place. Cam gears would help and so would a better set of cams. The car has 272/264 HKS and I think they ad to the fat torque curve but more exhaust cam would help.

I’ll work on a blog with more details tomorrow but for now I am happy and the One Lap VR4 is fast.

[View with PicLens]

Steve and I spent a couple of hours working on the little things. We had tee’d into the BOV line when we installed the FP3052 turbo. At the time we didn’t want to drill and tap the turbo for a boost source. The turbo is on loan and we want to return it in the same condition we received it in. So I installed a nipple in the lower intercooler pipe to provide boost to the boost controller.

Steve worked on finishing up the wiring to the trailer and after a little tweaking of the trailer light everything is working perfectly. Steve then moved on to the water injection wiring. Mike had started it on Saturday but with everything going on we didn’t get it finished. Steve made quick work of it and when I grounded the relay to test it out the pump powered up and everything worked great. We wanted to have the WI working for the dyno tomorrow so we can come up with a tune with and without it.
In the photos you can see the work Steve did to mount up all the electronic gear. Steve fabbed up a pair of tweed wrapped boards to mount the power inverter, wireless router, and water injection pump.
You can also see the cold air box Chris Wirth built to go with the turbo intake pipe I fabbed. There is a hole in the bottom of that box to grab air from outside the engine compartment. You have to see it in person to understand the attention to detail Chris put into this.
I also got a good picture of the hood vents that TunersNation.com sent us. I think they look killer!

As of today, we have 10 days to get everything sorted out with the car and be ready for this trip.  This weekend we called in Chris Wirth to help out and Mike was in town as well, so we had a long list of project to fight through.

Extending Power to the Battery

I did two things on Saturday.  I extended the battery distribution wire in the trunk, so that the circuit breaker and associate power source items were neatly tucked into the battery box.  The other thing I did was to waste most of the day trying to make a 4 prong trailer harness work, when I really needed the 5 prong.  I should have stopped after a few attempts and gone online somewhere to look it up.  Tim’s wireless at his house hates me, so I only try a few times to connect before I give up.

Mike showed up and we all lifted the hood outside, so he could start laying out the hood vents on the car.  The hood vents were a sponsor donation from TunersNation.com and are actual JDM hood vents for the Galant. On the JDM hood there is a space inset in the hood to put them in, so we had to do some cutting to make ours work.  Luckily Garfield at TunersNation set us up with the exact dimensions to get them centered on the car.

Chris Wirth was on ducting duty for good reason.  Chris has been developing and designing cold air boxes for years, and has gotten pretty damn good at it.  Where we once laughed at the level of detail he would put into keeping an area of the engine bay isolated from heat, he would prove the results at the track running the best times with fewer mods.  We knew that we needed his hands to help us squeeze that same advantage out of this car.

Tim fabricated a new 4″ inlet for the turbo, which looks absolutely huge.  When you create that sewer pipe, it is hard to fathom how much air is going through that area.  The end result was a smooth transition tube with one real bend in it, going direct into Chris’s cold air box. Chris’s airbox came out perfect and looks a little too professional for the car.  There is even a snug fitting cover that actually seals into place.  The metal in front of the wheel was removed to allow only cold air into the intake.

After some adventures with re-cabling power in the car, Mike and I teamed up to run the water injection system from the front to the rear.  The pump was mounted on the board to the rear seat and we needed to run the solenoid wire and tubing itself to the engine bay.